Two years ago, I was hired to ghost-write the memoir of an anti-apartheid activist who, after a lifetime of struggle, had fled South Africa and settled in Australia. I didn’t know much about South Africa at the time, but I thought, how hard could it be? Trickles of information had fed through to me here in Melbourne, bits and pieces of apartheid ephemera: Long walk to freedom, Cry Freedom; Graceland. I went to work. I researched, read everything I could get my hands on, and conducted lengthy interviews with the client. Toiling together, we produced a manuscript. Then, as I was taught when I trained as a journalist, I went looking for a local angle.

And I found it. Looking into the Boer war, the British colonial conflict to which 22,000 Australian troops were sent, of which 1000 never returned, I found something. Among the troops who never came back were fifty Australian Native Police Officers, so-called ‘black trackers’ recruited at the request of Lord Kitchener. Members of an elite force of Indigenous Soldiers and veterans of the British war against the first people of Northern Queensland, they were commissioned by the British to break the Boer resistance. They, alongside Australian colonial forces, helped win the bitterly entrenched guerrilla war for the British Empire.